Demetri Martin once joked that life vests protect you from drowning, bulletproof vests protect you from gunfire — and sweater vests protect you from pretty girls.

(Tolkien is, however, rumoured to have charged his offspring all their pocket money to hear the end of the tale, having already got them hooked. This “first hit’s for free” technique he learned dealing heroin to CS Lewis, who only began the Narnia chronicles in order to have a reason to meet his supplier every week in the Eagle and Child pub. Anyone who has ever tangoed with Sister Brown Eye will recognise immediately the safe warm feeling of falling into a wardrobe full of fur coats. And then having tea with a man with goat’s legs.)

I just added this snippet to the very top of my WordPress theme’s index.php:

<?php if(is_search()) {
header('Location: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=site:joshuagoodwin.com+' . get_search_query());
} ?>

If your theme has a search.php file, it’s even easier:

<?php
header('Location: http://duckduckgo.com/?q=site:joshuagoodwin.com+' . get_search_query());
?>

This is cool because it works with any standard WordPress search form – even the one in the admin toolbar. And the search engine is probably better than the one built into WordPress. Obviously, do swap in the domain name of your own site, and you can get really fancy with URL parameters.

Update (30 January): Pat Dryburgh presents a superior alternative, which takes advantage of the undocumented sites parameter. I did beat my chest for some time, thinking that surely such an thing must exist – even Google has sitesearch – but I couldn’t find any mention in the documentation, there being none. (Why?) Fortunately, Dryburgh is all kinds of magic, so good for him.

Unfortunately, the prickly Gaumont Film Company is in cahoots with YouTube’s smart algorithms. Even though there are hundreds of clips of their content that have already been uploaded as-is, my own painstakingly compiled derivative work set off some alarms.¹ So instead I present it here, liberated from the clutches of any corporate silos – entitled “James Moriarty versus Norman Stansfield”:

(You may download the H.264 file or the Ogg file.)

The prior art is Léon: The Professional (Gaumont, 1994) and Sherlock (BBC, 2012). (If the owners ask for it to be removed, then of course I will oblige.)

I know, some of the audio is too quiet and some of the audio is too loud. Goldilocks! And this is the second consecutive thing about that darned TV show – I won’t continue, I promise.

1. My theory is that the other pirates, in pooing up the aspect ratio as they inevitably do, incidentally outfox the ninja technology. It’s a shame that, as an aspect ratio puritan, I believe that no video at all is better than a painfully distorted one.

If you look at the picture above, you can see hexagons on the young Rumpole’s face. Hexagons, like in a honeycomb. Sherlock Holmes is a bee.

There’s the head of a wicker man behind Gary Oldman’s shoulder.¹

And all the features of a person’s face are clearly outlined in that blue binbag.

Do you need me to spell it out for you any further?

1. This is what I mean by “Gary Oldman”.

George Osborne has been in the news, right, because he is like the chancellor, of the exchequer. He does chancelling, yes, in a chancel, isn’t it? He lives in London, I expect, because that is usually where the politicians live.

The thing about him is, you can’t say “George Osbourne is not a real Osbourne”. Even if you can, it won’t make a lot of sense, because an “Osbourne” is not a thing beyond the context of being a surname. So my useful template is useless here.

He does look a bit like a badger, such that even though his surname isn’t Badger, it would be helpful to remind people that he isn’t one. But there is another thing about him: “George Osbourne is not a real George.” By which I mean that his real name is Gideon George Oliver Osbourne.

“George” Osbourne is a liar. He’s been lying to us. Because when someone says their name, it’s expected in Western cultures that the first name is followed by the last name, and that’s that. Osbourne has not met those expectations. But it’s clear that he doesn’t like the “Gideon” name, so what’s a man to do?

I’ll tell you what a man’s to do. Moments ago, into my face fell a book that had been written by Somerset Maugham, who is someone who writes books. But it was not by “Somerset Maugham”; it was by “W Somerset Maugham”. From this fact, we can learn several other ones. We learn that Somerset is not his actual first name, that instead it’s one beginning with W (probably Walt, Willie or Wendy). But we also learn that, just like the chanceller of the exchequer, he prefers his middle name. And that’s fine, since he has the decency to include the first initial, which serves as a helpful indicator that there’s somethin else there. So why shouldn’t Osbourne do the same? Why not “G George Osbourne”?

Major publishing houses almost certainly would be unwilling to permit Amazon to sell e-books sans DRM, in the same way that music labels were originally unwilling to sell DRM-free music. But so why not bundle the Kindle e-books with the good old-fashioned shareable, preservable, paper books? Change the pitch from “buy digital e-books instead of paper books” to “get a digital Kindle e-book with each paper book you buy from Amazon”.

There may never be an iTunes Match for books – it’s hard to prove to a machine that you own a book – and that’s a shame. But if someone has bought a meatspace book from Amazon, why the heck shouldn’t they be able to add the electric version for a reduced price? (Some cool indie book publishers already have this model in place.)

That argument in 2012 seems less infallible than it did in 2007. The status quo now encourages a diet richer in electrons, which more being more high-margin than paper is more preferable to the Jeff Bezos Dog Doo-Dah Band. Better for Amazon, but not better better. And Amazon is a scary gorilla that gets what it wants. (Maybe, right there, I have found the problem with capitalism.)

Clearly, this is a somewhere where Waterstone’s, Barnes & Noble – the big and still meatiest meatspace booksellers – could compete in the face of their own dwindling revenues and inferior/imaginary ebook stores. Imagine: If you bought some books from Waterstone’s, now you can “copy” them all onto your hypothetical Waterstone’s sandwich of plastic for a small price. Why hasn’t that happened yet? Is it already up someone’s sleeve? I hope so.

Ms. Schmidt, who once served as the creative director of Moomah, the children’s cafe in Tribeca that caters to parents in denial about some of the distasteful aesthetics of child-rearing, made the cards in her favored style of heavy stock, neutral paper and quaint typefaces.

This bit struck me on the shoulder:

(From The Party’s Over: How the West Went Bust, BBC Two. If the video refuses to play, try downloading it.)

1. John Lanchester’s point, again:

   Intuitively, you must think that since we’re having a crisis about debt, [and meanwhile] we’re forcing students to take on debt, a lot of them will then seek ways to immediately pay back the debt by going off and doing the kind of lucrative but not socially useful thing. That must be a quite likely risk.

2. Vince Cable said the “tax” word. And nothing broke. Amazing.

3. The man playing Michael Palin really does look like Michael Palin.

(Here’s an incidental thing: I just spent at least half an hour trying to pass parameters to the Vimeo oEmbed embed machine. I suppose I wanted to make the player more, uh, minimal. Well, it turns out that Vimeo Plus members can prevent people from customising some aspects of their embeds, and evidently Merlin has chosen to do that. Which is fine, but is there a parable in there?)